Black Market Apps supports the Android Developers Union!

Got a really encouraging today from Allen over at Black Market Apps, and he’s been kind enough to share his frustrations with the Market with us here [emphasis my own]:

Just wanted to email you and let you know we’re impressed by what you’re doing and hope you keep it up.  We don’t support 100% of the demands, but thats alright.  The concept of a developers union is a great idea.

Alone we’re small potatoes, but together we’re worth millions to them.  It’s time to start getting treated that way.

I don’t have a problem with the percentage of money they receive, given that they maintain all of the infrastructure.

 

My irritation is more regarding support and the market in general.  They don’t have things like reporting tools to show you downloads per month, or what search terms people use to find your apps, things like that, that would actually help you analyze and improve things.

And, there support is terrible.

I do have a grievance.  We had a Christmas live wallpaper which was fairly popular (2500+) sales and 100+ ratings (4.5 stars overall, etc).  I was using tags in my description to improve search visibility, which at some point without them notifying me became against the rules.  They suspended my app, and once i finally got a hold of them i said hey no worries i’ll change the description thats not a problem.  Instead of doing that though, they said they cant “unsuspend” apps for “auditing purposes”.

So, that basically wiped out all the sales/ratings data the app had earned, which are basically the only things you can use to build a reputation.  So it set that app back to square one.  No appeal process, that was it.  Pretty irritating to say the least.

You definitely get the sense that all of the so called “support” was a big afterthought.  All they seem to care about is making their market look good on the next device, and getting ad sales. 

Allen

 

 

Thanks for sharing with us here! If you are a developer or a customer and you have a grievance to share, write in to us at newfreedomapps@gmail.com

Also, thank you everybody who commented! Whether you support us or not, any contribution to the discussion is welcome! Some people have asked for copies of the emails/underhanded threats that Google sent, and I did actually keep them, so I can post them up here hopefully tomorrow. There’s been a wholeeee bunch of interest in this issue in the past two days (15,000 visitors in two days! Wow!) so sorry if I’m a bit slow to reply to all the emails and comments (everybody else who helped form this group has been busy/out of town for the weekend >=| ) but I do read all of them and will reply to as many as I can.

Thanks again!

R

 

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